a bit of both, the other bird was both bad paper, and poor lighting unfortunatly, my camera on the phone is not the best and the room lighting is lacking i have a choice of shadow over all of it, or shadow over parts, i do have a scanner but i cant for the life of me figure out how to stop it from enhancing colours and completely changing the appearance in its auto adjust crap

as to the leaves, the reason i didnt do them in this picture, is i dont have a very large pastel collection right now im sitting at around 16~ and i only have 2 greens a lime green and the majority of that background you see in this picture, because prior to giving this a shot most of my works been water n ocean and you dont need many greens, 1 here or there will do just fine, so for folage on this piece i think i will wait for a slightly larger collection of greens so i can really capture the australian deep green that the leaves would have in this piece